Anyone tried the OpenOffice suite of software. Has all the features of the "big boys" like Microsoft Office and Lotus Smartsuite but it is totally free and operates on any platform! I was writing about it for an Internet newsletter and am about to give it a try. Go to www.openoffice.org to read about it yourself.

This is a really good piece of software although it lacks the usability that MS product has. But it's free and has all important features that 99% people need from such an application.

For those of you who work on Mac, I can recommend NeoOffice, which is nothing but an OpenOffice using Aqua interface. It has its look&feel much more Mac-like than the original OpenOffice for mac. You can find it here: www.neooffice.org.

Both OpenOffice and NeoOffice are good bets. I use Keynote and Pages on a mac.

At the end of the day, you don't need many features at all on these sorts of applications and they all pretty much have these bases covered. In fact, even the compatibility side of things works perfectly between the packages.

Keynote and Pages are great and I use them as well, but I really miss a spreadsheet in iWork. Also, if you need to echange lot of documents with Windows users and both you and them are editing these documents, Pages doesn't seem to work well here. If you're dependent on Windows-based world around you, OpenOffice/NeoOffice is a good choice.

i use it instead of MS office as well, i'm putting together a list of suggestions that will make it more user-friendly, and like bartekr says, more usability. will check out neooffice tho...

OpenOffice is just fine for everyday use.
I only spotted room for improvement in a mathematics functions of Calc. Solver for instance (linear programming) had to be installed from the disk in MS Excel. I think that you have to install a plugin for Calc. I wish that sort of things were more user-friendly in Calc to beat Excel in that area as well.

I've been using OpenOffice for years. I wasn't thrilled with it at first, but it has improved so much that it now handles all of my office suite needs without any problem. It's simple to use and stable.

Yeah, OpenOffice is great. The only real problem I come across is that, even though you can save files as .doc for MS Word, you can't rely on the formatting being kept when you actually open the file in Word. Not a problem for some people, but if your documents are even vaguely complicated (i.e. use stylesheets), and you need other people to open them in an edibable format, then it's not quite right yet. Brillian product nonetheless.